With a score of 4949pts, the Extreme II outpaced every drive we’ve tested with PCMark 8’s storage benchmark. The Extreme II took 4123 seconds to complete the PCMark 8 benchmark, which was only slightly more than the Vertex 4. The Extreme II’s overall bandwidth figure was 233.7MB/s, 6% faster than the Vertex 450 and 13% faster than the Vertex 4. The Extreme II came second only to the Vertex 450 in the Adobe Photoshop heavy test, taking 362....

Normally, we also install half a dozen WD Scorpio Blue 500GB hard drives, and OCZ’s ZX 1000w power supply. There are two problems with that configuration with the Silverstone Raven RV05, firstly it supports just two 3.5" drives and with OCZ’s ZX 1000w PSU the 3.5" drive cage has to be removed. Therefore, we installed a shorter power supply and went with just two WD Scorpio Blue 500GB 3.5" hard drives....

With the exception of Far Cry Primal, it looks like the quad-core Ryzen CPUs will destroy the higher-end dual-core Kaby Lake processors such as the 7350K. Even at 4.8GHz, the 7350K was no match in the more CPU-intensive titles. It was interesting to find that when paired with the GTX 1070, the Ryzen CPUs were actually able to pull ahead in games such as Mafia III, while folks equipped with a sub-$300 current-gen GPU won’t see any difference between the quad-core Ryzen and Kaby Lake CPUs....

The GeForce GTX 480 saw a 22% performance decrease when enabling 4xAA at 1680x1050, from the capped 121fps to 94pfs. Keep in mind if it were not for the fps cap the performance decrease would have been larger. The GeForce GTX 470 which was also capped without AA enabled saw a 43% performance drop. Finally, the GeForce GTX 285 suffered a huge 44% performance decrease when forcing 4xAA. At 1920x1200 the GeForce GTX 480 lost 38% of its original throughput once 4xAA was enabled, while the GeForce GTX 470 became 50% slower with 4xAA forced....

Earlier this week, Sony notified PlayStation developers that if they produce games costing more than $34, they would need to include a minimum two-hour trial. Sony intends to use these timed demos in its PlayStation Plus Premium tier to entice more customers to shell out at least $120 per year. These reports are unconfirmed. On Thursday, an anonymous source with knowledge of the matter told Kotaku’s Ethan Gach that the PlayStation Store team would be responsible for creating the trial timers....

Business Insider sources claim that Sony is working out ways to get ads into free-to-play PlayStation games. The goal would be to encourage the development of more free-to-play games by giving developers more possible revenue streams. Instead of simply appearing in a PlayStation console’s interface or in-game menus, developers could place ads within a game’s environment, like virtual billboards or product placement. Advertising such as this is nothing new, but it could become more common if Sony supports it at the platform level....

If you are sitting there agitated that your PlayStation 4 or 5 is not taking that one-year extension, you just bought, chill for a minute. Sony has put pre-purchasing subscriptions on hold for the time being. It instituted the temporary shutdown because people have been using a loophole to gain huge discounts on the PlayStation Plus (PS+) Premium well into the future. However, Sony created a loophole when it decided how to fairly reposition subscriptions of unequal length....

The SoC’s die contains four 2.3 GHz Krait 400 CPU cores, an Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 450 MHz, a QDSP6V5A Hexagon DSP at 600 MHz, an LPDDR3 memory controller and a range of radios including LTE and Wi-Fi 802.11ac. Alongside the Snapdragon 800, Sony has packed in 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage with a microSD card slot, NFC, and an array of sensors. There’s nothing particularly special in the performance section of the Xperia Z1’s spec sheet, but also nothing appears to be missing....

The record figure pushes Spotify’s total payout since founding to $30 billion. Last year was also the first in which Spotify had more than 1,000 artists generate at least $1 million in revenue through the service. Of those, 450 generated more than $2 million and 130 artists exceeded the $5 million mark, representing increases of 110 percent and 160 percent, respectively, over the last five years. What’s more, Spotify had over 52,000 artists that generated at least $10,000 last year....

TrendForce writes that while a backstop of orders remains, demand for SSDs has fallen compared to last year’s levels when working from home was the norm, and more people were buying computer hardware. Other, familiar factors are behind the cooling demand for SSDs: the global economic downturn and rising inflation are affecting how much people are willing to spend. That’s led to companies, especially Chinese smartphone manufacturers, reducing stock. As such, there’s an oversupply in the NAND flash market....

The SteelSeries Aerox 3 Wireless has been one of the best-reviewed mice for those who love the popular honeycomb design. The company says its Aerox 5, Aerox 5 Wireless, and Aerox 9 Wireless mice build on their predecessor by offering the same feel and speed but with more configuration options. Weighing 66g, the Aerox 5 is the “lightest multi-genre mouse on the planet,” according to SteelSeries. It comes with nine programmable buttons and is the only one of the three that’s wired....

It is one of the greatest features the point and click interface brought to personal computers, and you don’t need to understand the mechanics behind this invisible, temporary storage system in order to copy and paste your way through text, images, files and folders. The act of transferring text from one part of a computer-based document to a different location within the same or different computer-based document was a part of the earliest on-line computer editors in the mid to late 1960s, though it was all command based....

Then you must consider the amount of storage you are after, as anything less than 3TB will probably make no sense with this product. The DS109 was just as fast and in some cases faster than the DS410j, while remaining about 38% cheaper, and can be equipped with a 2TB hard drive for as little as $170. Meanwhile, adding four 1TB hard drives to the DS410j should cost at least $320, taking the total cost to ~$700....

Again when working with large files we see that the Synology DS1515, along with most modern NAS devices, can max out a single Gigabit LAN connection, this time when uploading. The Synology DS1515 demonstrated superb upload performance using our game data. Here it sustained 87.1MB/s which was on par with the ultra-expensive Core i3-powered Asustor AS7004T and just a few megabytes per second slower than the DS415+. Although the Synology DS1515 was able to best the QNAP TS-451 and TS-653 Pro when measuring upload performance with our game data, this wasn’t the case with the program data....

Again we find when uploading a mixture of small and large files the performance of these devices is greatly diminished – more than halved, in most cases. The Synology DS2411+ was quite a bit slower than the DS1511+ in this test, but it still managed to exceed the results provided by the DS411+ and our Core 2 Duo test system. That trend remained identical in our program upload test: the DS2411+ (38MB/s) was much slower than the DS1511+ (50MB/s)....

PC Watch (via Tom’s Hardware) reports that the device is the latest in Japanese company Cooyoo’s Crazy Small line of peripherals. It’s essentially nothing more than a tiny, USB Type-C clickable mouse wheel that measures just 1.8 x 1.5 x 1 inches and weighs 22 pounds. The firm’s website shows it being operated by a hand/finger, but there are also images of someone using their foot to move the wheel....

If you just need to create a few documents and check your email, you can get by on much less than a $500 desktop. Buying a netbook or even a tablet are worthy options for the road warrior, but desktops still reign supreme in terms of cost-to-performance and expandability. If you follow our guide’s Budget build to the T, you can gift a system acceptable for any role apart from running graphically intense applications – which could also be attainable by investing a few extra dollars in a video card....

Motherboard, Processor, Memory AMD reclaimed a seat in our Budget Box back in 2011 with its Llano-based desktop APUs and it has maintained that position with its Trinity, Richland and now Kaveri chips. The Kaveri-based APUs have been shrunk down to the 28nm process and as a result consume considerably less power. Want to see how the Budget Box performs? We built one and benchmarked it here. In our Kaveri review, we found the part’s general execution to be slower than Intel’s offerings while consuming more power, but its integrated graphics core was significantly faster, exceeding some entry-level discrete graphics cards....

Motherboard, Processor, Cooler, Memory Intel’s new Broadwell-E range is mighty impressive in terms of performance while the price leaves something to be desired. For that reason, we have chosen the Core i7-6800K which features 6-core/12-threads and operates at up to 3.8GHz out of the box, though it is fully unlocked for even greater operating frequencies. There are tons of high-end X99 boards available and unless you’re hunting for a particular feature, you’ll probably be equally satisfied with anything you pick....

As it’s becoming more common, the majority of big announcements were made even before the show started as every company tried to jump ahead each other in order to grab everybody’s attention. This year wasn’t the exception and in fact the few major announcements made throughout the week were promptly taken care of in our regular news coverage. Thus this article is not meant to be a memory refresher, but to give you a brief outlook on what we observed and what caught our attention during the show....